Ceiling panels are commonly used to form the ceiling of a building and can be made from a variety of materials including mineral fibers, cellulosic fibers, fiberglass, wood, metal and plastic. It is typically beneficial for such ceiling panels to have good structural properties such as stiffness and resiliency, as well as flame resistance characteristics. For some applications, it can also be beneficial for the ceiling panel to have acoustic absorption properties.
It would be advantageous to provide a ceiling panel which possesses excellent structural, flame resistance and acoustic absorption properties and in addition, very light weight. It would be even further advantageous, to aid shipping and storing costs, if the ceiling panels were able to be compressed to a fraction of their normal size for packaging, and then would spring back to normal size for installation and service. Such a ceiling panel has been designed by others utilizing fibrous, nonwoven mat, see published U.S. Patent Application No. 20020020142 filed Apr. 23, 2001. Unfortunately, conventional fibrous nonwoven mats have failed to meet all of the requirements of this design, which are to be able to, after being scored, folded, and compressed, to spring back to the original shape and orientation, and also to avoid giving off toxic gases when subjected to fire. Johns Manville's DURAGLAS™ 8802 mat, an acrylic bonded, wet laid, blend of glass fiber polyester, mat failed to perform satisfactorily in this ceiling tile because of excessive flammability and excessive sag at ambient temperatures. The present invention overcomes these problems and fills this need for a suitable mat for making ceiling tile according to the above mentioned U.S. Published Patent Application.